15th of August…A flurry of activities underlines this day. On this day, everyone gets on a high horse to discuss problems of the country threadbare and do some serious introspection only to stuff back the high-rhetoric into a bundle, a day later. Huh!

So on this day, I decided to do some introspection myself. This was to find out if things have really changed in all these 61 prized years. I was ready to tack my journal with things that would either make me go tut-tut-tut or put a smug smile on my face. Read on to find out about my mission’s progress through the day.

Morning blues came in the form of a bumpy rickshaw ride on the traffic-heavy Mumbai roads. And thanks to the abundance of rain puddles, I experienced (not for the first time though) the agonies of being thrown into mid-air and being pulled back by virtue of sheer gravity. 61 years back, one would have heard of people rolling and pirouetting on the kuccha road tracks. We would have wished this experience to fade away into the sepia-tinted frames. I wonder if the BMC is making us relive that era by not filling up the piddling puddles. Right, things have not changed much on our “roads” to independence.

Completely different was my experience while boarding a new-fangled, sparkling train from Dadar. This train had (believe it or not) sleek aesthetics, padded and ergonomically designed seats, freshly painted interiors with tinted glass, shiny hangers, et al. Full marks to the politicians who made this happen by ensuring that they burn down enough trains (under religious/social/regional pretexts) annually for the CR to replace them with new ones.

As the train clickety-clacked through some breath-stopping (well literally) landscapes of pooping cows, overflowing drains, dirty nallahs, I wondered if it will take another 61 years to clean all this mess. And surely another 61 years to clear the cobwebs from the minds of our inefficient and corrupt babus!

However, something passed me that made me squeal with delight. It was Ranbir’s poster on the back of a BEST bus. I was happy seeing the change that has come about in the la-la land of Indian movies. Even though we are pilfering movies/songs (like never before) from the west, we are treaded in the right direction at least when it comes to making our heroes strip (remember the Saawariya towel act). The producers have finally woken up to the view that the female species love to lap up every cheesy chunk of these chick magnets! Did we hear of this in the Alam Ara era, hell no! And may we galz get to see more of Ranbir (no pun intended!).

And yes the television was never so full of the adrenaline pumping speeches/songs/films about nationality. I was impressed with one of the hard-hitting dialogues by SRK in the film Swades that I watched on this day. He says Indians love to couch on the “nationality” idiom all the time and call themselves a culture-rich nation when the truth is that we are lagging behind most of the countries on every count. SRK drove home the point that it is work and not talk that will get India on the global radar. Yes, we did hear a homily on pretty much the same lines coming from our netas of yesteryears. But things have remained the way as they have always been!

For instance, the number of medals that we win in the Olympics remains constant every leap year. It’s a shame that we are celebrating the success of a solitary bronze/silver/gold medal won in the games when other countries have piled on enough metals to open a mine for themselves. So when Abhinav Bindra was quizzed on how he felt after he won that medal, I had the strangest sense of déjà vu. Some may talk about coming home and dry at least on the “IT/BPO front”? Well, a small piece of info for all of you. Some of the BPO employees who were on a holiday on July 4 (US Independence Day) worked on August 15 because they were not entitled to enjoy any Indian holidays! Another shocking fact is that while we burn our mid-night fluorescent bulbs and bend over backwards (till our heads touch the back of our feet) to get the outsourced work done, we get only 10 or 20% of the wages of our Western counterparts. All this suggest a modern form of slavery (not very different from the bonded slavery days of a pre-independent India).

So its true, things have not changed much. I wonder why are we not in the same league of the developed countries when we have ample resources and enough grit to make things happen? Where did we go wrong? I only wish that we bounce back from seemingly nowhere and in quick time so that we do not have to do such introspection on the day we got our freedom. Amen!